Fractal urbanism: City size and residential segregation in India

Abstract

We present the first ever large-scale snapshot of urban residential segregation in India at the neighborhood-scale. Our analysis from 147 largest cities in contemporary India shows how caste-based residential segregation is independent of city size (our sample includes all cities in India with at least 0.3 million residents in 2011). The extent of segregation in the largest metropolitan centers with over ten million residents closely tracks cities that are nearly two orders-of-magnitude smaller. We also show how residential segregation across a large swathe of urban India mirrors the spatial geometry of rural India. Our findings call into question one of the central normative promises of modernization in India and elsewhere — the gradual withering of traditional ascriptive identities such as caste. Our paper also contributes to the emerging debates in urban segregation by developing an interdisciplinary framework for analytical and empirical operationalization of a neighborhood unit.